Civil War Art at the Smithsonian

7/30/2019 Civil War Art at the Smithsonian

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FIAMrICAN

Previewing Upcoming Events, Sales and Auctions of Historic Fine Art

Nov/DEC 2012

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As seen in the

November/december issue of

Previewing Upcoming Events, Sales and Auctions of Historic Fine Art


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by James Balestrieri

The rights o states versus the role o the

ederal government, the rights o people

to dispose o their property as they see

t, the contending values o urban and rural,

industrial and agrarian America, immigration,

the role o religion in the state, the issue o

racein this election year, reading Eleanor Jones

Harveys superb and meticulous catalog or the

Smithsonian American Art Museums exhibition

The Civil War and American Art, mounted to markthe sesquicentennial o our nations bloodiest war

and only internecine confict, one has to wonder:

is the Civil War really over? True, no states are

currently seceding, though there have been threats

rom the governor o Texas. And ownership o

human beings is outlawed, though the rhetoric

o slavery continues to be adapted to political

discourse: shall the government enslave us, or shall

we live in thrall to corporate masters? But even

though the actual issues may have changed, todays

map o red and blue states in many ways resembles

the map o the blue and the gray.

As i aware o the ongoing tensions, The

Civil War and American Artis a thorough, careul

exhibition, and it is all the more essential or the

attention that has been paid to the various strains

o art and photography as they responded to a war

which had an outcome that was all but certain.

November 16-April 28, 2013

Smithsonian American Art Museum

8th and F streets N.W.

Washington, D.C. 20004

t: (202) 633-7970

www.americanart.si.edu

Stries HarvestThe Civil War and American Art at the Smithsonian opens November 16

MuseuM Preview: washington, D.C.

Sanford Robinson Gifford (1823-1880),The Camp

of the Seventh Regiment near Frederick, Maryland, 1863.

Oil on canvas. Lent by private collection.


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Harvey wisely deconstructs a staggering

number o works into our categories:

landscape painting; photographytheCivil War is the rst war in history to

be photographed extensively; paintings

by artists who served or accompanied

the armies into battle; and paintings,

especially those by Winslow Homer

and Eastman Johnson, that specically

reerence abolition and emancipation.

The exhibition centers on artists working

in or near New York, largely because

the cityapart rom the Drat Riots o

1863saw no action. Harvey explains that

the Southern art market all but evaporatedduring the war. Many wealthy patrons fed

to Europe and many o the great cities

o the South were occupied or destroyed.

Nonetheless, 10 paintings by Conrad Wise

Chapman, who enlisted in the army o the

Conederacy and was made a sta artist

under General Beauregard, provide some

balance, as do works by E. L. Henry, Julian

Scott, and others who saw in the Rebel

deeat the passing o the antebellum way

o lie and were shocked at the suering o

the Southern states. The victors write thehistories, so the saying goes. They paint

them as well.

The exhibition boasts a number o

ne landscapes. Among them, Martin

Johnson Heades 1859 masterpiece,

Approaching Thunder Storm, stands out.

Seen in the context o the 19 th-century

American landscape traditionas it is in

its permanent home at the Metropolitan

Museum o Artit is a brooding, orward-

looking work. The overlapping fat elds,

strong shapes and intrusions o color

anticipate strategies more common to

later masters like Edward Hopper, Victor

Higgins, and Faireld Porter. But when it

was rst exhibited in the spring o 1860,

Winslow Homer (1836-1910),Prisoners from

the Front, 1866. Oil on canvas. Lent by The

Metropolitan Museum o Art, git o Mrs. Frank

B. Porter, 1922. Image The Metropolitan

Museum o Art.

Winslow Homer (1836-1910),The Veteran in a New Field, 1865. Oil on canvas. Lent

by The Metropolitan Museum o Art. Bequest o Miss Adelaide Milton de Groot

(1876-1967), 1967. Image The Metropolitan Museum o Art.

Conrad Wise Chapman (1842-1910),

Battery Bee, Dec. 3, 1863, 1863-64. Oil on board.

11 x 15 in. The Museum o the

Conederacy, Richmond, Virginia, photography

by Alan Thompson.


5/7MuseuM Preview: washington, D.C.

just ater the abolit ionist John Browns

ateuland ailedslave revolt at

Harpers Ferry, Virginia, the idea othe coming storm was a common

metaphor or what many saw as an

unavoidable confict between the

Northern and Southern states. Heade,

an opponent o slavery, sold the work

to Noah Schenck, an abolitionist

preacher and riend o Henry Ward

Beecher, by ar the most prominent

among those who thundered rom

pulpits against the evils o slavery. It

is perhaps no accident, as the catalog

observes, that Beecher also owned one

o Heades storm scenes.

While the context brings the work

to lie, it is visually arresting on its

own. The wrecked sailboat, the sail

draped limply on the rocks, the man

and dog sitting calmly, turned away

rom the viewer, watching the rower

make or shore and the sailboat try

to run round the point, these are

strangely placid, faccid elements in

a moment that seems as i it should

be lled with energy. The ship o

stateanother popular euphemism

or the nationis either hopelesslywrecked, or helpless, or running

beore the wind. The fat planes o

blackening gray in the sky and water

simultaneously conrm and deny the

sense o perspective, oreshortening

and compressing time and space. The

daggers o land at right and let, and

the nar row near shore, despite being

brilliantly lit, oer only a temporary,

shrinking respite.

The soaring landscapes o Cole,

Durand, Church, and Bierstadt that

conerred our New Eden, give way

to a more disturbing vision o nature

as amoral, indierent, or hostile. In

the war-related landscapes o Sanord

Robinson Giordwho served in the

Union armyand Frederic Church,

skies become blood red, trees are

blasted and burned. Nature, refecting

our violent schism, turns against us,

mirroring the judgment o an angry

God. The intentionally malevolent

sky in Giords magnicent work,

A Coming Storm, 1863, persists in

special poignancy and ironyamatter o public record even then, as

the exhibition statesas its owner

was none other than Edwin Booth,

Americas oremost actor and brother

to President Lincolns assass in, John

Wilkes Booth.

Only ater the war, as westward

expansion came to the ore in the

American mind, did landscape assume

anything o its ormer, benign aspect.

To this point, The Civil War and

Amer ican Art is a relatively bloodless

aairthen there are the photographs.

In them, the war comes home. The

dead come to lie. Photography, a

young ar t then, had seen some action

in the Crimean War. But artistsor

they saw themselves as suchlike

Mathew Brady, Alexander Gardner,

and Timothy H. OSullivan, carrying

cumbersome cameras over rough

terrain, oten at great personal risk,

raced to the great battleelds o the

Martin Johnson Heade (1819-1904),Approaching Thunder Storm, 1859. Oil on canvas, 28 x 44 in. The Metropolitan Museum o Art, git o

Erving Wol Foundation and Mr. and Mrs. Erving Wol in memory o Diane R. Wol, 1975. Image The Metropolitan Museum o Art.


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Civil War to capture the horror o

war with an immediacy no one could

have imagined. Where Brady and his

team o photographers ocused on

the ruined orests and landscapes as

symbols, capturing the topographies

o war much as Heade, Giord and

others did in painting, Gardner and his

team chose to depict the dead, settingstandards or journalistic on-the-

scene veracity that lasted until the two

Iraq wars and the war in Aghanistan.

Though these early photographers did,

on occasion, move a body or eect or

superimpose a more dramatic sky onto

a vista o rubbleeects that were

noted by contemporariespeople in

New York and Washington focked to

view these photographs. It is easy to

see why. Even now, 150 years later,

they are as hard to look away rom asthey are hard to look at.

Timothy O SullivansA Harvest of

Death, Gettysburg, 1863, is perhaps the

best known photograph o the war. As

ghosts in the mistor so they seem

to beone mounted, two on oot

survey the tilted eldas i the corpses

in their unnatural contortions will

slide away, letward down the slopeas

i we wish they wouldwhat comes

to mind is Whitman, Walt Whitman,

in Specimen Days, writing about thebattles he saw, the wounded he tended

to, the dying young men whose last

letters home he took down and sent:

the innite dead(the land

entire saturated, perumed with

their impalpable ashes exhalation in

Natures chemistry dist illd, and shallbe so orever, in every uture grain

o wheat and ear o corn, and every

fower that grows, and every breath

we draw)not only Northern dead

leavening Southern soilthousands,

aye tens o thousands, o Southerners,

crumble to-day in Northern earth.A number o painters bore

witness to the war. Four painters

whose works are not included in the

exhibitionand whose impressions,

both successul and less so, would

have provided a useul counterpoint

to wartime photographyare Louis

Lang, Thomas Nast, James Walker, and

William Washington. Their attempts

to paint grand historical works in the

immediate wake o events would have

been worthwhile additions.

Conrad Wise Chapmans Battery

Bee, Dec. 3, 1863, at rst glance, is a

straightorward work depicting the

Eastman Johnson (1824-1906), A Ride for LibertyThe Fugitive Slaves, March 2, 1862. Oil

on board. Lent by Virginia Museum o Fine Arts, Richmond. The Paul Mellon Collection,

Photo: Katherine Wetzel. Virginia Museum o Fine Arts.

Timothy H. OSullivan (1840-1882),

A Harvest of Death, Gettysburg, July 1863.

Albumen print. Chrysler Museum o

Art, Norolk, Virginia. Museum purchase

and partial git o Carol L. Kauman and

Stephen C. Lampl in memory o their

parents Helen and Carl Lampl.


7/7MuseuM Preview: washington, D.C.

changing o the guard at a ortied

position in Charleston Harbor, which

was then being bombarded daily by

Union ships. But despite the makeshit

barracks and the lumpy redoubts, the

tattered fag o the Conederacy faps in

the breeze in a sky worthy o Giovanni

Battista Tiepolo. The work conveys

steadast pride and resilience as do all oChapmans paintings in the exhibition.

That reconciliation between the

North and South would not be easy

is perectly captured in Winslow

Homers Prisoners from the Front.

Like Eastman Johnson, Homer

appropriated the conventions o

genre painting to advance a point o

view, creating allegor ies that were

implicit yet understood. In Prisoners

from the Front, The expressions

on the aces o the unrepentantConederates, as Harvey wr ites,

tell the hard truth. Overcoming

the divide between Northern and

Southern attitudes at the close o the

war would prove ar harder than the

conlict itsel.

Similarly, JohnsonsA Ride for

LibertyThe Fugi tive Slaves, March 2,

1862 nds a black amily in a gray

dawn limbo. The reedom they race

toward is only slightly br ighter than

the lie they are feeing. The husband

and wie, Janus-like, gaze in twodirections, caught between the past and

the uture, the known and unknown.

At the last, Homers Cotton

Pickers and The Veteranin a New

Fieldencapsulate the ambiguities o

postbellum America. In Cotton Pickers,

the young woman, cotton cling ing to

her dress, pauses, thinking, dreaming.

But o what? In The Veteran in a New

Field, the armer, a veteran by his

clothes, mows his grain. Is he aware

o the Grim Reaper irony his imagepresents? Is he remembering the

war? The allen? We do not see his

ace. Homer turns him away rom us,

leaves him with his thoughts, with

memories that we, perhaps, could not

begin to understand.

In subsequent wars, as realism

seemed less and less capable o

conveying the unimaginable horrors

o modern warare, artistsPicasso

in Guernica, saywould explore

new ways o expression, attempting

to externalize these interior,psychological responses. But, given

their training, given what they thought

art was and was supposed to be and do,

the artists o the Civil War let us with

a rich legacy that reminds us that the

history o art is history.

America oscillates between

individual reedom and equality,

between our rights as citizens and

our responsibilities as citizens. These,

the twin pillars o our philosophy,

are orces that strain or mastery inan eternal tug o war. Have they ever

been in perect balance? Can they be?

Is our Civil War really over? Can it

ever be?

Sanford Robinson Gifford (1823-1880),A Coming Storm, 1863, retouched and redated in 1880. Oil on canvas, 28 x 42 in.

Philadelphia Museum o Art: git o the McNeil Americana Collection.

Civil War Art at the Smithsonian

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